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“I should give my Mama more credit than that,” my grandmother started to explain after we ordered our food. “She was a tough woman. I’ve never been as tough as she was, but at least I knew what it looked like,” she chuckled. “I guess it was just a month or two after I met Arthur that Mama met Willie. She got married several times, but Willie was a mean sort. He used to get drunk on bad hooch that would give him terrible hangovers, and he’d take it out on us kids or Mama. When he started swingin’, she’d start screamin’, and between the two of them, it sounded like we lived in a war zone. She once tried to cut his finger off with pinking shears because she kept telling him to stop sticking his finger in her face or he was going to be missing it. He just picked a bad time to start messin’ with Mama that day. She was making a dress for Jonnie’s school dance, and the scissors were still in her hand. She got blood all over the dress, though, and she got so mad at him that she made him go buy her all new material so she could start over. He wasn’t too happy about that because it cut into his liquor money.”
“But wasn’t it Prohibition?”
“Sure was, from 1920 to 1933, I think, but he didn’t care about those laws. A lot of people didn’t. I still think he was the one who ran the moonshine through that little shed by the church,” she furrowed her brow. “It would explain how he found out about Arthur and me.”
“He found out about you?”
“Yep, but by then, Mama already knew anyway. She just didn’t know what I’d been up to with Arthur.”
“What do you mean? What had you been up to?”
“By the time Mama figured out I was seeing a boy, I was seventeen, and we were in love. She knew there wasn’t much she could do about it, so she just let us be. But she didn’t know that he’d given me a ride in an airplane, and that gave me a thrill big enough to make me a bit of a daredevil. You get that from me,” she winked at me. “I wanted to bring in a little pocket money to help Mama with things around the house, so I became a temporary stand-in as a trapeze artist for a while in a local circus. I was tall and skinny, so I fit in the costume the other girl had worn, and at first, I didn’t need to do a whole lot except not be afraid of heights. They taught me everything I needed to know. But the only way I could get there was by plane because it would take too long otherwise. Arthur would give me a ride in his plane every weekend. We’d get there, and I’d go to the tent and change while he fed apples to the horses. Then when it was time for the show, he’d buy a little thing of popcorn and sit in the stands while I did my act. I started out on the trapeze, but not being one of the swingers. I would just stand at the top and hold the swing when it came back to me. I’d be there if anyone needed help with their wardrobe or anything silly like that. But no matter what, Arthur would always cheer me on even when I didn’t do anything but hold a rope for someone else. Then one of the gals got hurt one day, and they asked if I thought I could do what she did. She didn’t do a whole lot except swing from her knees and grab the wrists of the other person swinging from their knees, then land back on the platform on the other side. I figured I could do it, except there wasn’t time to tell Arthur first. I think I just about gave him a heart attack that day. Poor boy spilled all his popcorn on the kid in front of him and was probably screaming some pretty nasty words right out loud. People were looking at him funny.”
“Grandma! You swung on a trapeze?!” I was dumbfounded. I had never imagined my grandmother swinging through the air from a trapeze in a circus tent.
“Sure did,” she grinned proudly. Our food arrived, and we fell silent for several minutes as we prepared to eat the feast before us. “But that’s not the crazy part of the story.”
“Excuse me,” I demanded, staring at her over the sesame seed bun in my hands. Barbeque sauce dripped from the back of the burger as I paused in shock.
“That was just the beginning of it,” she grinned just before taking a massive bite of her burger.
“What all did you do? Better yet, what did you NOT do?”
“There wasn’t a whole lot,” she chuckled. “That airplane gave me a whole new world to explore, and I wouldn’t have done any of it without Arthur.”
“But you roller-skated down the capitol building steps long before you ever met him,” I reminded her.
“Where did you hear about that?” She stared at me, shocked. A tiny piece of lettuce hung from her lip.
“You told me,” I grinned. “I think I was only about four years old at the time, but we were at Disney World, and you told me about it when you took me to the bathroom to wash my face.”
“And you remember that? Goodness, I should be careful what I tell you,” she winked. “That brain of yours is like a steel trap.”
“I get that from you,” I grinned and winked, then took a bite of my own burger.
“Well, I guess you want to know the rest of the story, right? So Arthur was taking me to the circus every weekend for months, and the circus would be closing down for the winter. They’d pack up and go to a warmer climate, leaving me stuck in Arkansas without any daredevil stunts to perform and no pocket money to take home. So we hatched a plan. Arthur and I did. We couldn’t do it on the cold days, but when it wasn’t too freezing, I became something called a wing walker.”
“What in the world is a wing walker,” I asked, terrified that I already knew the answer and marveling that she was still alive to have a family afterward.
“They were the daredevil women who would walk along the wings of an airplane while it was flying,” she grinned, knowing my reaction of shock would be absolutely genuine. “In the winter, I would put on a pair of Arthur’s breeches and a heavy pilot’s coat and boots. Then I’d put my feet in these straps that he riveted onto the plane’s wing, and we’d take off. I’d stand up on the wing of the plane, and we’d fly over the city with some banner advertisement flying behind us. We made a lot of money doing it because everyone wanted to see the only wing walker in Arkansas. And because I did that, everyone wanted to advertise their products with banners behind OUR plane. They knew everyone would look! And boy did they look. Of course, that high up, nobody knew I was a woman up there, but most wing walkers were women, so I think they knew anyway.”
“Grandma, that’s kinda crazy.” I had stopped eating my burger and was just staring at her blankly.
“I told you. I was a daredevil. Arthur made me want to really live my life, not just exist within it.”
“But you’re a grandma,” I reminded her.
“I wasn’t always,” she grinned. “I had a life before you came along. Hell, I had a life after you came along, too. Just not as much of one.” She laughed at me.
“I suppose so,” I nodded, going for another bite of my burger amid the chaos of my mind.
“My mother was an orphan from Scotland. She came through Ellis Island with a bunch of other orphans. That’s where you get your red hair from, by the way. It’s the Scottish in you. Anyway, she grew up in an orphanage, and I don’t know how she got from Ellis Island to Little Rock, Arkansas, but that’s where she grew up. Daddy met her there. He was born on a dirt floor in western Alabama. His family was forced off their land by the government because they wanted to flood it and make a dam. He was really young when that happened, and they moved to Arkansas. His parents were killed when he was still pretty young, and he was put in the same orphanage. They decided pretty early that they were going to get married and have a family because they always wanted to know what that was like. I bet anything that Daddy wasn’t planning on dying when us kids were so little. But that’s what happens, I guess. Anyway, with all they saw and lived through in the orphanage when they were little, Mama was a bit protective of us kids at first. It’s part of why she wanted me to dress like a nun in a convent and why she wasn’t happy with the idea of me dating. But she got used to that idea. I just knew she’d have a heart attack if she ever knew that I was a trapeze performer or a wing walker. I couldn’t understand that when I was doing it back then, but I understood it a lot better after I had kids of my own.”
“Didn’t you care if you died?”
“Sure I did! I just knew that life wasn’t worth living unless I really lived it, too.” She smiled a wide, proud smile. “And I really lived. Plus, we made good money that Arthur wanted me to keep after we paid for the airplane fuel, and I was able to help get the house in better shape. We got a new coat of paint, the broken porch got mended, and Mama could afford real food for us kids. She didn’t ask where the money came from. I think she was scared to find out. Willie didn’t ever ask either. I think he just didn’t care, just so long as it didn’t come from his drinking money or his secret stash.”
“How long were you a wing walker?” I wanted to visualize her being this great daredevil just a little longer, fantasizing that I could be up there with her.
“Just that one year,” she smiled. “Sometimes, life just gets in the way.” Her expression changed to one that seemed somehow familiar but so far away that I couldn’t quite place it.
“What happened? Is that when you and Arthur stopped seeing one another?”
“Oh, nothing quite that ominous. It was the stock market crash. It was the start of the Great Depression, and his family had to sell the plane to cover some of their expenses.”
“I see,” I acknowledged, fully comprehending that she viewed her breakup with Arthur as more ‘ominous’ than the Great Depression. Something in her voice sounded fake, but I couldn’t accuse her of it. Nothing else she said would possibly be believable, but the sale of the plane didn’t resonate with me for some reason, even with a perfectly reasonable explanation.
“Let’s talk about something else for a while now,” she prompted, and I knew our conversation about Arthur was done for the day.